Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Three CRM 2.0 solutions you absolutely must try.

The days for CRM industry dominated by SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, Sage, HighRise and other enterprise solutions are over. New CRM 2.0 kids are on the block and they are growing like crazy. So what is CRM 2.0 exactly? Nobody knows. Clearly CRM 2.0 is the next generation of customer relationship management tools, but CRM 2.0 means different things for different people. For some, CRM 2.0 designation stands for collaborative CRM. For others, CRM 2.0 means using social network tools like LinkedIn or Facebook for prospecting and selling. Another popular interpretation for CRM 2.0 is reverse CRM or user driven customer relationship management. So let’s take a look at three CRM 2.0 examples and discuss some of the CRM 2.0 leaders.

1. Collaborative CRM

Bitrix24.com is probably the fastest growing CRM 2.0 solution, if 2.0 means collaborative CRM to you. Essentially Bitrix24 is enterprise social network, plus CRM, plus project management, plus planner,plus document manager, plus business process construction and 30+ other tools. Here’s a typical scenario for Bitrix24 use. Let’s say you are a web design firm with a free quote form on your website. As soon as the form is filled out, Bitrix24 creates a task for one of your employees – get in touch with the person who filled out the form. You can set up your Bitrix24 in a way that all quotes for work over $5000 go to employee A and all work under $5000 to employee B. Then the employee calls or e-mails a client from INSIDE Bitrix24. If necessary, Bitrix24 calendar schedules a meeting. Depending on the outcome of this conversation, Bitrix24 can automatically create a new task for a new employee – like “Send contract to” or “Create draft by”. At this point you can also create a workgroup for a specific project and invite client and all relevant employees there. You can post drafts in the activity stream and your client(s) will provide feedback. You can also use Bitrix24 WebRTC based videochat that works just like Skype to have ‘face-to-face’ conversation. Because Bitrix24 tracks time spent on each project and has invoicing, you can send the bill via Bitrix24 to your client as well. Should any questions arise, they can be solved inside Bitrix24. So essentially, it’s a collaborative CRM – a place where sales person, who brought the client in, the client herself, the account lead, the designer, the web developer, the lawyer, the accountant, the HR person can all work together and collaborate on pretty much any project. From brain storming to file sharing – all collaboration tools are there and they are tied into CRM. And because Bitrix24 is 100% free for companies with 12 employees or fewer, it’s no wonder it’s such a popular CRM 2.0 solution.

2. Social CRM

Nimble, just like Bitrix24, became a clear leading CRM 2.0 solution in a very short time (probably because CRM industry legend Jon Ferrara of the Goldmine CRM fame is behind it).That is if 2.0 means using social network data for selling to you. A typical Nimble CRM scenario looks something like this. You are enterprise software salesperson. So you are very interested in CTOs, CIOs and heads of IT departments. It just so happens that LinkedIn makes it very easy to find these people, their names and company addresses. So you import all this information into your Nimble CRM. But that’s not all. Nimble works with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, importing all messages, posts, tweets and status change notifications. Let’s say an important business meeting with one of your hot prospects is in an hour. You go into your Nimble account, click the prospect name and you now have access to all recent social network activity of this person instantly. You know from his last tweets that he has just returned from a vacation in Fiji and Facebook pictures suggest that this person just became a grandfather. So you start your conversation by congratulating him and share your Fiji experience, and before you know, you are almost best friends. Tricky? Devious? I’d prefer damn effective or brilliant as the best word that describes Nimble. Nimble CRM is free for solo use.

3. User driven customer relationship management.

Traditional CRM is used for sales mostly. And not everyone believes that proactive sales is the best way to grow a company, so for these folks CRM 2.0 designation means user driven CRM. Some of these CRM 2.0 tools are vendor specific, like Dell’s IdeaStorm.com but the best example of a reverse CRM is probably UserVoice.com. A typical scenario looks like this. A person registers at UserVoice.com. She then goes through items, gadgets, software and services she uses (Windows Phone or Hootsuite, for example), to provide feedback and ideas. This is where you come in. You can tap into the wealth of this knowledge and actually actively solicit this feedback, especially if you place UserVoice module on your website as the made feedback form. Clearly, you won’t have access to all users, but with UserVoice you can get to the most important part – early adopters and brand ambassadors. Like Bitrix24 and Nimble, UserVoice gives you an option – use if free or pay for advanced options.

Clearly, these three CRM 2.0 solutions are very different but you can probably use all of them. In fact, I insist that you should. Happy sales to you!

Why developers at domain name registrars will be working overtime this fall

ICANN announced today that its Board of Directors has approved the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

It’s the conclusion of a long and contentious process that has
resulted in arguably the most sweeping changes ever in the contract that
governs the relationship between ICANN and domain name registrars. I’ve
written previously about the impact this will have on domain
registrants.Yet domain registrars will also face substantial burdens,
and this
will particularly affect smaller registrars with limited resources. Due
to the new RAA and other changes in the domain name market, the next
six-to-twelve months will be some of the most demanding (and potentially
rewarding) domain registrars have ever experienced.

What’s required of registrars

Registrars will have to integrate or create a number of systems and
practices under the terms of the 2013 RAA. Some of the demands on
registrars include a phone or email
verification system for registrant details, cross field validation, more
data retention, additional compliance rules/timelines and changes to
whois proxy services. Michele Neylon, chair of the Registrars
Stakeholder Group and CEO of
domain registrar Blacknight, told Domain Name Wire that email/phone
verification is small potatoes compared to the rest of the requirements.

“The cross field verification is easy in some countries, but harder
in others,” he said. “This and other things related to data retention
are going to cause headaches.”

Neylon also pointed out that requirements in the new RAA aren’t all that
registrars are grappling with these days. There are preparations for
new top level domains and the trademark
clearinghouse integration, as well as policy changes related to expiring
domains and domain transfers. Add that to a push for DNSSEC and IPV6,
and domain registrars’ IT teams have a lot on their plates.

A rush to sign on — or be left behind

With all of these new requirements, why would any registrar rush to
sign the new RAA? There’s a bit of a carrot or a stick, depending on how
you look at it.

Cyrus Namazi, Vice President of DNS Industry Engagement for ICANN,
told Domain Name Wire that he expects registrars to sign on “very
quickly”.

The main reason is that adoption of the 2013 RAA is necessary in order
to sell new top level domains. A bit further down the road, ICANN also
isn’t renewing the 2009 RAA.
If a registrar signed a five year agreement in 2009, time is quickly
running out. Furthermore, proposed new registry agreements for .biz,
.info, and
.org will soon permit registrars to sell these domains only if they’ve
signed the new RAA.

I reached out to three of the top ten registrars today to find out
when they plan to sign the RAA. They all either didn’t know or had no
comment.

James Bladel, Senior Director of ICANN Policy & Planning for
GoDaddy, said “The new 2013 RAA represents a milestone achievement for
our industry, thanks to almost two years of work on the part of
Registrar Negotiators and ICANN Staff. But finalizing the language of
the agreement was actually the easy part, and now the real work of
implementing the new RAA can begin. Registrants and customers should see
these changes in the coming months.”

A challenge for the small guys.

GoDaddy, Demand Media, and other big registrars have plenty of development resources to throw at the problem.

The same can’t be said for small and medium-sized registrars, which were physically absent at the negotiating table.

“You could tell there was quite a bit of sensitivity put on the table
by these guys [about what would be required],” said Namazi.

Namazi also pointed to the gradual implementation of new requirements
under the RAA, including a grace period until January 2014 for many of
the provisions. Getting registrars to implement the changes will be difficult. Even
making them aware of what’s in the new RAA will require a lot of work.

ICANN is beginning an outreach to registrars, including an event in
China that will be conducted in Chinese. The 2013 RAA is in English, and
language is a key barrier to understanding and adoption.

“You can imagine what’s happening with small to medium sized
registrars in Latin America and the Asia Pacific, which in some cases
might not even speak English,” Blacknight’s Neylon noted. “Most of the
communications, events, etc., are conducted in English. If English is
not your first language it’s very hard to actively participate within
this entire circus.”

ICANN is also working on events to educate registrars in other parts of the world. It’s kind of a big deal.
With all the noise about the new top level domain program lately,
it’s easy to overlook the critical milestone that the 2013 RAA is for
ICANN. It’s a culmination of a multi-year effort involving governments,
law enforcement, intellectual property interests, and domain registrars.

But as GoDaddy’s Bladel noted, the easy work is done. Now the “real work” can begin.

So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that FreshBooks isn't really about bookkeeping. Instead, FreshBooks is really one of the first timekeeping and invoicing software turned SaaS (it'll be interesting how FreshBooks reacts to the recent onslaught of free CRM with invocing).

FreshBook is now used by over 5 million users and known for it's "braindead simple" approach. One of the reasons for that that one year after being launched in 2003, it had only 6 clients. That's six. And 24 months into operation, it had only 10. This is how Mike McDerment recalls these days:

"So we tried a PR firm and I like to say that I got my Masters in
Communication through that process because we basically…we didn’t get
any awareness built out of it whatsoever. And so we shelved that and we
went back to putting our heads down and spending our money on direct
response type marketing, like being in an email newsletter or
pay-per-click. You know, started trying to learn a little more about
who was being successful marketing themselves online. So we started
learning more about blogging and that kind of thing."

Two things saved FreshBooks - first they changed their pricing. Not once, not twice but actually four times, and every with every time they'd get more and more paying customers. Second, FreshBook decided to become a 'human' company, meaning that if you call their number, you actually get a human being on the other end. And if you have a question, you can an answer. And corporatespeak was banned at the company as well.

Becoming a user centric company transformed FreshBooks in a number of ways. Feeback was collected not as a formality, but in order to stay ahead of competition, so it's no wonder that FreshBooks one of the first to offer iPad app, when others weren't so sure about that anyone would use mobile apps for their invoices. Addition of expense tracking and cloud accouting significantly expanded FreshBooks use beyond its core market of small business owners, lawyers, designers and other professionals (my girlfriend uses iOS mobile app to track her daily expenses). With WaveAccounting and Bitrix24, FreshBooks makes the Holy Trinity of SMB and Productivity 2.0 tools that every business owner should be aware about. Oh, and if you want to try FreshBooks, here's your $50 coupon)

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Weird Startups - numberFire

http://www.numberfire.com/
The age-old rivalry between jocks and geeks is finally dead--and Nik Bonaddio is the killer. Bonaddio is founder and CEO of numberFire, an analytics platform that takes sports data to new brainy levels. Combining mathematically derived metrics with advanced algorithms that factor in situational variables, numberFire turns the "unstructured and misleading data" around sports into highly accurate stats and predictions for NFL, MLB and NBA players and teams.

What this means: Your betting odds just got better, and your fantasy-sports team just dominated. In fact, the New York City-based company's official 2012 March Madness bracket correctly picked the winner (Kentucky) and finished in the top 1 percent of brackets nationwide. NumberFire claims that its data gives users a 31 percent higher chance of winning their fantasy leagues and beats the projections provided by leagues 93 percent of the time. The company has about 40,000 users.

"Fantasy sports is a really big market that's been underserved for a long time," Bonaddio says. "We're scratching the itch a lot of people have."

A two-time All-American in track and field, Bonaddio got his head in the sports-data game after joining a fraternity at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied information systems and communication design. "I realized the advice you get around fantasy football and sports in general is very qualitative. It's all, 'I think this team is going to do well,' and this never made sense to me, because sports is all about numbers--the box score, the touchdown, the yards--but no one was doing any data modeling or data analysis," he says. "I analogized it at the time to finance: When you make a trade, all the big banks are using these complex models and quantitative trading algorithms, and I didn't understand what was so different about sports."

Bonaddio seems to have a knack for winning. After walking away with $100,000 from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2009, he quit his job and parlayed the cash into building data models. He launched numberFire in 2010, focusing on football insights; the site quickly secured fans by outpredicting the experts at ESPN and Yahoo 70 percent of the time by the end of the season. Bonaddio drafted Keith Goldner, an analyst for ESPN and two NFL franchises, to refine the predictive models, and last year expanded numberFire to include baseball and basketball. The startup, which continues to consistently beat the projections of CBS, NFL and Yahoo, has scored $775,000 in funding from investors including RRE Ventures and TechStars' David Tisch. Revenue--which grew from $10,000 in 2011 to $250,000 last year--is derived mainly from premium subscriptions (basic analytics are free) and partnerships with major media companies, which leverage numberFire's data on their own sites.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Hot Startups - BixNets.com

https://www.bixnets.com/
Baby boomers are retiring, and millenials are becoming mobile more than ever. For a business, especially those that recognize the importance of its workforce and the knowledge gap that may occur as a result of an imminent departure of older personnel, this can be bad news, especially for business and economic growth. As per a recent study, it is believed that in North America alone, about 75 million old-timers will be leaving the workforce within the next 15 years.

The lines “for every unmet need, there is a startup waiting to happen” and “if you can’t beat them, join them” aren’t without merit. A startup by the name of bixnets.com, short for Business Intelligence Exchange Networks, came about as a result of a conversation its founder, Brad Gaulin, had regarding baby boomers leaving the labor force. And if someone is to help the younger generation succeed in any way, shape or form, knowledge and expert mentorship has to be given to them where they usually look for them. Cases in point: Wikipedia, Amazon, iTunes, Kijiji, Facebook, Google apps, among others. Combining the concepts behind these platforms led to the creation of bixnets.com.

Of course, startups aren’t without their share of difficulties. When asked what has been the most challenging, Gaulin said it was giving away 80% of the company as sweat equity to his co-founders who were all working part-time. He had thought that doing so would get things done quickly. The opposite had happened, however. As it turned out, managing a large group of part-timers wasn’t easy. It took them about a year to achieve six months of progress, if only they had taken the normal startup cycles.

Aside from its core offerings (mentoring social network and knowledge crowdsourcing that allows a user to upload his expertise, which can then be downloaded by other users for free or for a fee), bixnets.com also has bixDonate, a program that allows experts to donate a portion of their earnings to registered charities, entities dedicated to learning and community development, nonprofits, universities, and the like.

There is also an enterprise edition which allows a company’s workforce to share their expertise with other members of the same company through knowledge packaging and mentoring. Everything is deposited in one place for convenient future access.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

New Crowdfunding Startup FundersClub Hopes To Changes The VC Game

While crowdfunding doesn't yet allow the 99 percent to invest in
companies directly--Kickstarter and Indiegogo supporters typically only
contribute or buy a future product--FundersClub is prying open the door
to allow more people into the VC game.

The goal of the venture capital platform is to facilitate financing in
early-stage companies for small but accredited investors who wish to
make low minimum investments. The start-ups, meanwhile, have a better
chance of lining up funding than they would from family, banks or angel
investors.

Since attracting $6.5 million in VC funding last summer to launch the
platform, San Francisco-based FundersClub has helped place more than
$2.5 million into nine companies, including Soldsie, a startup that lets
merchants sell directly on Facebook; Tracks.by, a social promotion
platform for musicians; and Sponsorified, which connects brands with
sponsorship opportunities.

The FundersClub website handles all financial transactions and legal
paperwork for both investors and startups. Here's how it works.

Members must be accredited investors who earn more than $200,000 a year
or have a net worth of more than $1 million. "We scaled from nobody to
5,000 registered, accredited investors in just six months," claims CEO
Alex Mittal.

FundersClub sets up various funds to support pre-approved startups. The
investors can pick which funds they want to buy into, putting up as
little as $1,000 in exchange for equity in the fund.

Mittal says investors tend to be highly connected individuals from the
likes of Apple, Facebook, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company, and
they're expected to offer expertise and connections to the startups.
"The doors they can open are very important," he says.

"We're not looking for ideas," Mittal explains. "Companies should have
legs and show success in monthly revenue growth and adoption numbers.
They need to have the right people who can handle the challenges a young
company faces."

Mittal's investment committee vets each company before passing it along
to FundersClub's "Angel Panel," a vetting group of members (typically
people with expertise in a startup's technology
or target market). If the panel gives the thumbs-up, the nascent
company creates a detailed profile with video introductions of the team
and its product/services and sets an investment goal; this is then
shared and viewed by the larger FundersClub investment community.

Yun-Fang Juan, a former Facebook engineer, was one of 72 FundersClub
investors who contributed to the $425,000 raised for Soldsie. Juan liked
the team and the idea so much that she signed on as Soldsie's fifth
employee. "She knows Facebook inside and out, so we immediately gained
expertise we didn't have before," says Soldsie CEO Chris Bennett. "That
was huge for us--as important to us as the money."

Monday, June 17, 2013

Hot Startups - Bitrix24

Bitrix24.com is a new SaaS (software as a service) cloud based social intranet
platform that makes corporate intranet easily available to smaller
companies. It does not take any time to deploy (everything is
already installed and set up) and doesn’t cost anything if it’s used
by companies with fewer than 12 employees.

At first,
Bitrix24 looks like corporate Facebook – there is the wall or
activity stream where different employees engage in discussions and
vote by ‘liking’ ideas, documents or workgroups. There are also
instant messenger and photogallery. This is where the similarities
end.

The
first important Bitrix24 module is free CRM (customer relationship
module) that comes with a database for clients and prospects that
are easily sorted by events (phone call or meeting, for instance).
Next comes the sales funnel that divides clients into
easy-to-work-with groups - new prospects, first contact, requested
quote, scheduled meeting, negotiations and sales, for example (the
actual setup is customizable). Bitrix24 free CRM is designed for
easy interactions with clients. For example, you can send an e-mail
to a certain group as well as import/export any client information.
You can also set Bitrix24 to automatically import ‘leads’ that are
generated by any site into the CRM.

The
second important module is document management. This module allows
storing, editing and collaborating on various documents with
co-workers. The documents can be made private (visible to document
owner only) or shared. Bitrix24 also tracks version history, making
it possible to revert to older version of the document, if
necessary. Importantly, you can map a single document library or
all of your document libraries to a network drive on your local
machine literally in 2 clicks using WebDav. That means that whether
you use Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, you will be able to see the
documents in the intranet locally through your file manager.

Third
and fourth are planning and task/project management modules. These
include calendar, work reports, absentee charts, meeting
scheduler, personalized to-do lists, time management tools, even
Gantt charts for easy visualization of progress made on specific
projects. The employees are split into workgroups and access rights
are assigned to each individual. For example, the department head
may see work reports of his subordinates only, while vice-president
is able to view every work report made by any employee.

Because
companies tend to outsource or hire outside contractors/freelancer
Bitrix24 allows one to easily integrate those into workgroups and
give non-employees access to corporate intranet with restricted
rights specified as necessary. Also, for higher mobility,
Bitrix24.com can be easily accessed via iPhone, iPad or any Android
based device.

As mentioned, Bitrix24.com is free when used
by 12 employees or fewer. Bitrix24.com can be used by unlimited
numbers of workers for $99 a month. Unlike other similar services,
Bitrix24.com doesn’t charge extra for each additional employee,
since it is cloud based and ample storage is available. The premium
version is priced at $199 a month.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Will Thumbtack Become The Yelp Of Local Contractors?

Companies from Angie’s List to Yelp to HomeAdvisor have tried over the past decade to crack the U.S. market for plumbing, gardening, and other local services by developing an online database for homeowners looking for reliable referrals. There have been limited successes but no breakout leader, partly because many of the nation’s tens of millions of local small business owners spend relatively little time on the Web and run their businesses the old-fashioned way, with a pen and pocket calendar.

Now there’s a new entrant in this crowded field, Thumbtack. The San Francisco startup has operated quietly for four years, building a database of more than 250,000 service professionals who can pay the company fees for referrals. They include home maintenance workers and a wider range of occupations, from wedding officiants to yoga instructors. Thumbtack planned to announce on June 13 that it has raised $12.5 million from a group of investors, led by Sequoia Capital, that are chasing the chance to build the next great online e-commerce hub. “The long-term vision is to build the Amazon for services,” says Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack’s 27-year-old chief executive officer. “We want to build the kind of brand that the Yellow Pages had for decades.”

Zappacosta and co-founder Jonathan Swanson, 30, say they conceived of the company in 2008 in the West Wing of the White House, where they were working for the National Economic Council under George W. Bush. While they weren’t the first to notice that people have “bought and sold local services in the same ways for the last 50 years,” as Swanson puts it, their twist was to develop software, instead of using salespeople, to scour the Web for service professionals and invite them to join Thumbtack’s database. From there, the workers are vetted by the company’s 30 U.S. employees and some 200 full-time contractors based in the Philippines.

Thumbtack says it gets about 2 million monthly visitors who request referrals and provide their Zip Code. It sends each request to relevant workers in its system, who pay up to $15 each time to have their names appear in the particular customer’s list of referrals. The company likens the fees to Google’s AdWords, which sells ad space to the right of search results for desired words and phrases. (Yelp is ad-supported; Angie’s List charges users for subscriptions.)

If its database doesn’t include a qualified service to meet the customer’s needs, Thumbtack’s software crawls the Web to find one. “The hard part is finding the right service professional who is trusted and is available at the right time and at the right price,” says Bryan Schreier, a Sequoia Capital partner who is leading the investment. “That is the art of Thumbtack.”

Thumbtack will have to work hard to keep its database stocked with reliable small business owners. Trying to fulfill all kinds of jobs in every corner of the country, its founders say, is the heart of its challenge, and how it plans to use its new capital. It already has some satisfied vendors: Ricky Jackson, a personal trainer from Houston who goes by the name Coach, joined Thumbtack last year and credits it with a 75 percent increase in business. The key to exploiting the service, he says, is to stop whatever he’s doing and respond promptly to its e-mail and text alerts. “There are probably four other personal trainers that are always as aggressive as I am, and there should probably be 400,” Jackson says. “It’s a quiet little secret.”

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Three Free SalesForce Alternatives That Are Better Than SalesForce

With 60 dollars per user per month (that’s if you want to have access to app marketplace where all the goodies are) and a two year minimum contract frequently required, SalesForce is out of reach for most small businesses. And it’s really a shame, because SalesForce is a great CRM. But don’t despair, here are three free SalesForce alternatives that are actually better at some things than SalesForce itself. Check out our SalesForce vs Bitrix24 vs Nimble vs Streak review.

Bitrix24 is the most popular and powerful free SalesForce alternative and for a good reason. In addition to offering an extensive CRM that’s 100% free for 12 users or less, it’s actually a much better SalesForce Chatter alternative than Chatter itself (social intranet). In fact, Bitrix24 comes packed with free goodies that SalesForce itself doesn’t offer (other than through third party integrations) – like project management, file sharing, mobile CRM, doc management, video chat and videoconferencing and so on. The best thing about Bitrix24 is that it offers you a choice – you can either use it as SaaS literally within a minute of being set up, or you can host it on your server and tweak it as you see fit.

In the customer relationship management world the name Jon Ferrara (Nimble’s founder) carries the same weight as Mark Benioff – both were CRM pioneers. Mr. Ferrara has retired in the nineties to raise his children and recently returned to the market with social CRM. While Nimble isn’t nearly as powerful as Bitrix24 or SalesForce – its ‘social’ aspect does have a leg up on both systems. So if you do a lot of marketing, prospecting and sales through social networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook, Google+ or Twitter, you’ll be blown away by Nimble. And the fact that it’s 100% free for a solo use (single user) doesn’t hurt. After that, you pay $15 per user per month.

Streak CRM is a newcomer to the already overcrowded marketplace – so hardly anyone knows about it, but the few users who do use it, swear that it does miracles for their GMail use. While Bitrix24 and Nimle decided that they want to eliminate e-mails in internal communications, Streak has embraced it, particularly GMail. Essentially, with Streak CRM you can use your GMail account for sales, hiring, bug tracking, and customer support. Streak is a Y Combinator startup, which means that if you are a techie, you’ll love it, but if you run a ‘normal’ business or don’t use GMail much, you should probably stick with Bitrix24. Oh, and since Streak is still in beta, it’s 100% free (paid plans are coming soon, according to the site).

Hot Startups - The Story of Hailo

One day in 2011, three internet entrepreneurs set up a meeting with three cab drivers in a London cafe. Many hours later, they emerged as the six founders of Hailo, a mobile app that connects taxi drivers with passengers.

One of the 'treps, New York native Jay Bregman, harbored a near-obsession with the "fundamentally inefficient" taxi industry that stemmed from his previous venture, a highly successful same-day delivery company.

"Taxis in New York spend 40 percent of their time--in other cities, 60 percent of their time--cruising for fares, while people find it difficult to get a taxi," explains Bregman, Hailo's CEO. "And there was nobody to put them together."

During that fateful meeting, the three cabbies--with half a century of driving experience among them--provided insight that led to Hailo's unique solution: approaching the industry from the driver's perspective. "What we discovered was that in order to create the best passenger experience, we needed to focus on creating first the best driver experience," Bregman says.

Hailo's free driver app includes a location-based social network for taxi drivers, digital logbook and enterprise resource planning statistics. But the most important feature is a news feed where drivers can update their status, providing other cabbies with important information such as where more taxis are needed and which streets to avoid due to traffic. "We can get tens of thousands of drivers using this system before they ever accept a single customer,"

Bregman says. "That means by the time we have our first customer come
onto the network, we nail that first-time experience." And they are
nailing it: Hailo's passenger app boasts five-star ratings in the App
Store and on Google Play from a combined 8,000 users.

The company launches the free passenger app once Hailo reaches a
critical mass of drivers (the number is different in each city). Users
can hail a cab and then pay for the ride with credit-card information
stored on the app; a receipt is automatically e-mailed. In the U.S.,
passengers are charged a "Hailo fee" ranging from 99 cents to $3,
depending on the city and time of day. In international cities where
fares are higher, such as Dublin, Hailo charges drivers a 10 percent
commission.

Hailo's aim is for passengers to be able to get a cab in two minutes,
with two taps--a goal it has already achieved in London, where the
service launched in November 2011. It is now the world's widest-reaching
taxi app, operating in eight cities--including New York, Boston,
Chicago, Toronto and Madrid--with Tokyo on deck for later this year.
Hailo has received more than $50 million in funding and has facilitated
rides for 3 million passengers from 30,000 registered cab drivers. Up
next? World domination. Bregman says the platform has the potential to
go beyond the taxi industry and create community networks to address
inefficiencies in other markets. He won't share details, but says new
offerings could be available by the end of the year.

Saturday, June 01, 2013

People often underestimate the importance of
SaaS marketing optimization.

Certainly in most cases, once a plan is worked
out, some initial level of optimization is conducted, or else every marketing
campaign in the history of SaaS would fail horrendously. Unfortunately, the
cursory tweaking is usually all that is done. Sure, the marketing plans usually
work out if the plans themselves are solid on a basic level, but they could
work better.

Considering you must have a good positive ROI on
your SaaS marketing strategy, optimization is a great way to work toward this
goal. Unfortunately, how to optimize marketing in this industry seems like an
elusive bit of knowledge to many, so with that in mind, maybe we ought to talk
about some of the more important and basic tenets thereof.

First and foremost, we need to talk a little bit
about demographics. I don't need to talk about how important demographics are
to any marketing campaign, be it SaaS or otherwise. But, while you surely
regard it as important, and pay a lot of attention to it, there's probably some
optimization here you might not think of trying. Heck, I didn't think of this
until a far wiser marketing guru pointed it out to me either!

There's something to be said for allowing some
slack in relevance when targeting demographics. In SaaS, this is mostly in the
purpose or industries your software may target, but this is a generality in
marketing as a whole. See, if you find the relevant points that make this your
demographic of choice, then you can expand on demographics this target may
associate with, and relate to them on all or some of the same points that form
the triad. This creates a larger outreach and potential user base, while still keeping
focused on a general demographic set. It sounds odd, but it does work!

Now, with this retargeting of your demographics,
your campaign should shape up a bit and not seem as oddly specific or out of
sorts as it probably does, because a bit more generality of demographic will
also bring general relation in the campaign as well.

Now, let's talk about testing a little bit. When
testing, there are of course a couple phases you have to work through. Now,
initial in-testing before doing anything external, there's probably nothing you
really do wrong. This is pure scientific method and mostly, it's the
programmers who are doing this testing, and they see the world in a unique and
alien way, compared to that of marketing.

It's the external testing, or the Alpha/Beta
phase, that we need to address here. This is where civilians come into the
equation, and you can get real hard data on how potential users perceive the
product. This is where big immediate flaws in functionality, design or UX
overall should be spotted. Many software firms mess this up, SaaS and
otherwise.

Here's the scoop. Everyone does this testing far
too passively. The best way to see customer reaction to errors, or how well a
scheme works when being used complexly is to put the test subjects in complex
situations. Basic encounters only test the surface of the software. Have
scenarios of significant complexity you wish them to test. This may mean being
a bit more selective with your test subjects, but that is a small sacrifice to
make. Also, with good tutorial software that can onboard with your SaaS, you
can guide them through processes if need be.

Now, we come to one last place where everyone
really messes SaaS marketing up. Metrics, statistics and logistics are easy to
be overzealous with. They say you can't measure something too often, but
"they" are wrong. You need to know the right time, pace and level of
detail to take these metrics, otherwise you'll have too much, and numbers in
statistics will be too diluted with fluff.

Consider which metrics are the most important,
and consider how often to measure different ones. If you're more selective and
synchronous with your measurements, you'll be able to see much more clearly,
and avoid mistakes or working hard rather than smart in many scenarios.

So, there's a lot to be done with optimizing
SaaS marketing, but none of it's terribly complex. Of course, it can go deeper
than this, but you haven't time to read a lot of literature on this subject,
and really who does? In that case, these are the big points to take away from
the subject, in my very modest opinion.